BODHISATTVAS: Solo Exhibition
Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria’s first solo show at Gaffa Gallery, March 2011, featured large scale painted portraits or “archetypes” exploring themes of transformation, mythology, symbolism and the search for the self. The exhibition featured works on paper and Canvas.
CATALOGUE ESSAY: Absorption and Re-birth in the Bhodisattvas of Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria
Essay By Mark De-Vetis, Department of Art History and Film Studies, The University of Sydney
Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria’s first solo show, Bodhisattvas, presents a series of works largely depicting single figures. Challenging this unity however, the paintings’ display great diversity of subject matter, and include Christian deities, vampiric beings and mythological creatures. Such a varied collection of individuals is rationalised through the name of the series, Bodhisattvas, taken from the Buddhist concept of enlightened existence or enlightened beings. This title does not simply refer to the subjects of the works though. Through the material reality of his practice, Wolfe-Alegria initiates a series of interpretive challenges that encourage the development of a heightened perception, for both himself as creator and for those encountering his completed works. Ultimately the artist’s personal progression in realising the series, moving through the various cultural, religious and professional influences of his diverse experience, provides fuel for a process of examination and assessment driven by sensory experience and the fundamental act of visual engagement.
This is achieved in part through intertextualities of visual motifs, driven by the artist’s diverse practice. With a strong background in graphics and design as well as painting, printmaking and drawing, Wolfe-Alegria presents a unique style, which through its very hybridity secures the absolute attention of his audience. The interplay of sensitive line and rhythmic pattern conjures a mood of inquiry as the viewer seeks to navigate the visual field and resolve the tensions of graphics and recessional depth, colour and line, exposure and concealment. The state of absorption born from the act of complex visual navigation places the viewer in a heightened state of awareness, receptive to the artist’s meditations on the process of enlightenment.
This is evidenced in the work Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), which depicts the god Pan, who is associated with fertility and Spring. His status as a deity is evoked by the pure white dots that surround his head, which function as a radiating halo of light. This repeated pattern of dots holds the gaze of the viewer and affirms the surface of the work. Yet the wash used to colour the bulk of his body, and its stirring contour lines, establish a firm solidity by their blending and pooling to form crevices and mass. This tension between surface patterning and rotund form rouses the viewer who moves between the various incarnations of pictorial space, various states of awareness. The great, vital Pan whose life giving force stimulates an intense physical response, as the fluid seeping from his body awakens and “opens the eyes” of the rampant vegetation, also awakens the viewer by forcing us to question the nature of sensation and the need to locate ourselves in response to his enigmatic presence.
This process of navigation and examination is furthered through the very materiality of Abre Los Ojos. The artist uses a combination of pigmented ink, watercolour, gouache and acrylic to continually re-form the expressive possibilities of the individual elements in relation to a wider whole. The knowing Birds of Paradise are covered in a milky wash, which covers the same dotted pattern that boldly encircles Pan’s head. This is suggestive of phases of birth and release; where pattern operates as a vital essence that infuses the work at different material levels; within and without. Similarly in I Died for You, the graphic contours seek to establish definitions of form and express the planes of the exposed body, encouraging the viewer to adhere to and indeed trace the physicality of the materialized Christ. At the same time the coloured wash does not necessarily respond to these markers, establishing an alternate construction of the figure. Such use of materials is highly suggestive of the tensions that exist within the character of Christ who is at once fractured and infinite, simultaneously divine and human.
The ambitious final work We Are Not your False Idols depicts the Hindu Goddess Kali, traditionally associated with time and change, who seemingly acts as a synthesis of the motifs and interests of the overall project. A less acknowledged version of her myth frames her as a violent and destructive force, her blood-lust only ended by the appearance of her husband in the guise of a child, who has morphed to swell her maternal yearnings and thus stabilise her frantic rage. The theme of (re)birth resulting in salvation links this work with the Christ figure of I Died for You, suggesting themes of redemption and transformation. A centrally placed Kahli sits reborn as mother, with traces of her former violence strewn about her. The left panel swarms with competing elements and patterning, while on the right a severed demon’s head is given prominence by a boarder of negative space infused with swelling golden hues. The prominently displayed head suggests the nature of self-transformation, its alacrity and unpredictability. For while Kahli reclines, her rage ended, both she and the head still drool fresh blood. Kahli is a site of recent transformation, as blood mingles with evidence of her new found maternal desire, the tears of her eyes and the milk of her breasts.
To map a course through the dangers of Kahli’s shifting state of being then defines an encounter with a Bodhisattva. Through this and all the works, Wolfe-Alegria acknowledges that enlightenment requires resources and will; to traverse his complex field of created and challenged realities, his pattern and space, line and colour, is journey towards awareness, a quest which ends with acquired insight, understanding, and ultimately enlightenment.